56 |^ |^ August 2019
CLOUD GAMING
DREAM
S
As Google announces the Stadia, Christian Guyton
investigates the past and future of cloud gaming
treaming is a funny thing.
For movies and TV, it’s no
surprise that it’s taken off;
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Amazon Prime Video offer
unlimited on-screen entertainment at
subscription premiums, demanding only
5Mb/s to deliver HD-quality movies to our
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phones. Music is even less demanding- just ask Spotify to quote you its crisp
$1.5 billion revenue from the last quarter
of 2018. But gaming? That’s a whole
different ballpark. In fact, we’re not even
sure if it’s the same sport.
Issues that make zero difference to the
streaming of movies or music become huge
complications when games enter the fray.
Frame rate? Latency? Load times? All big
concerns. Nobody cares (or even notices,
really) if there’s two-tenths of a second
between pressing the pause button on your
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stopping, but such a delay could be the
difference between victory and crushing
defeat in a high-stakes match in Call of Duty.
Games – even single-player ones – chew up
bandwidth like nothing else when played via
streaming, too; 5Mb/s isn’t even close to
enough for anything remotely demanding.
Many have tried and failed to deliver the
perhaps-mythical ‘1HWÁL[IRUJDPHV’ often
discussed by developers and journalists alike,
with each doomed attempt leading to a slew
of articles touting streaming-based gaming
services as a dead medium. It’s a tired cycle
that has been struggling onward since the
early 2000s, each new attempt drawing
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burning to a painful halt.
Enter Google, as it always does, with its
own hot take on the latest fad. Announced
at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in
San Francisco, the Google Stadia promises to
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streaming world. With multiplatform
support, 4K and 60fps capability, and an
evolving cloud-based infrastructure, Stadia is
perhaps the most ambitious project of this
type to date – EXWZLOOLWVXFFHHG"2QO\WLPH
will tell, but for now, we can take a deeper
look at the history of streaming-based
gaming platforms, and what directions they
might take in the future.GETTY IMAGESNIGHTMARE?
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